Letter to the Editor

The latest edition of our weekly local newspaper is carrying an article with the headline "Nelson Says 'No' to Health Care Reform." And now, because I attended the event to which the article refers and because that was not my impression at all, writing a letter of rebuttal is in my air. But don't know what I should say, nor do I really know why I should feel so obliged to do so, even if my wife thinks it's a good idea.

You might think that that would be child's play for me, considering the years of stuff I've put into this weblog. And it's not like writing a Letter to the Editor is something strange for me. I haven't written many, but I've written enough, including to the NC Times, that it would be easy to do.

But the Nelson County Times is not in any sense my milieu or my venue, and it is definitely NOT Blogger or this weblog. I have always subscribed to it, that's true, but only so as not to be totally ignorant of the many strange things happening in my immediate vicinity. But it has been years since I've read that paper closely and with real interest. That started around the turn into this century, when in the course of just a year or two, things in my life converged in such a way that, for one thing, I lost all interest in local matters. And, more importantly, I could no longer stand the extreme disservice that the newspaper was performing in consistently hewing to the conservative right wing way of thinking.

Regardless of the Freedom of Speech stuff and financial considerations, it seems to me that no communities of any size should be subjected to having its lone newspaper or its other main sources of information leaning completely to one end of the political spectrum, to the scornful and near total exclusion of the other end.. Though we see that happening all the time these days, such situations must be extremely damaging to a country that is so evenly divided between decent and indecent people, with a large number of Uncertains sandwiched between..

That kind of thing is a big reason why there is so much cold-heartedness in the nation as a whole, despite the election of B. Obama, an event that, to at least a few rainbows born before, say, 1940, still seems so unbelievable -- and also keeps them feeling constantly fearful, because of what could so easily happen to him in spite of all his best efforts.

The decisive factor in Obama's win was obviously that the shortcomings of his opposition trumped the traditional antipathy to his kind of ethnicity. It was too easy for people to see that, right on the heels of the clearly disastrous GWBush years, the Republicans were offering only more Variations of the Undesirable: a klutzy, short-sighted, and short-fused candidate for President, and a candidate for the position only a few feeble heartbeats away from him who sent people scrambling for new and extended definitions of "bimbo."

There's something of a distance between that practical perception and a general and genuine goodness of hearts.